Disclaimer

Black Dragon is MY Viewer, i decide which feature i want to add and which to remove, i share this Viewer to show the world that user base size is not important, i do rate quality by effort, thought and love put into the project, not some rough estimated numbers. I consider feature requests only if i you can name proper valid reasons i can agree on. It is my (unpaid) time i'm putting into this project, i'm not here to cater to every Joe's desires.

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

As hinted in my last post a month ago i might do monthly change writeups, so today i'll write up and explain the changes that came with the last 3 updates during October and the one coming with this blogpost.

Interface

I removed the background on teleport and replaced the progress bar with a more fitting texture, this should give you a better view on the now improved teleport transition.

Preferences had some slight improvements too, i added a bar that shows you your total GPU memory usage (not just SL), custom memory was removed and made the baseline, no more linked texture memory sliders, you'll have to set both manually now. The maximum of both sliders will automatically scale off of your available GPU memory to prevent you from accidentally setting it to stupidly high values.

With the above changes i also made some changes to the texture console to give more detailed information on the used GPU memory, i relabeled Gl tot and texture to System and Scene to make it more clear which ones are hitting the limit and might need an increase in your settings. The total memory usage bar at the very top also now displays different colors for different usages: non-SL (grey), FBO (red), system (yellow) and scene (cyan).

Then there's the pie menu. In the past i've been changing things, trying to improve on the simple pie menu up to completely redoing the entire placement of all options, this time i just made it funnier to look at it by adding a new popup animation and some options to control its speed or toggle it off completely.

Since i'm not going to actively write any more update posts i've added a changelog list to the login screen... some of you might have noticed it already. It's there to remind you of all the changes and obviously also to be able to read them without going onto the changelog page that might be a bit slower to update.

Lastly i dropped the ball on the machinima sidebar and added vector3 and vector4 controls to it, meaning you can now change vignette and shadow resolutions. I also moved the volumetric lighting toggle below shadows to make it clearer that it's a sub-feature and not a separate feature that can work on its own.

Graphics

I changed the SSAO defaults a bit to make SSAO accumulation with multiple overlapping SSAO areas less extreme. (Mostly noticeable on plain, detail less single color surfaces)

Camera

For a long time (all the way back to Nirans Viewer) the camera was overly stiff and direct which was not intended, a change i made quite some time ago made the camera transition between teleports which was completely unnoticeable unless you changed the camera smoothness, i corrected the default smoothness value and the Camera should now act smoother when moving it, not annoyingly smooth but also not as aggressively direct like it did before, the result is that from now on you should see the camera move between teleport locations which is a nice unintended transition effect.

https://gfycat.com/WarpedImpressionableArchaeocete

Viewer Code

As always the Viewer has been brought up on par with all the latest changes from LL, this includes the VLC Media replacement as well as the latest Bento changes of that time. Soon i'll follow up another Bento merge with a few more changes and fixes.

I made some improvements to the Alpha/DeAlpha code allowing it to alpha/dealpha all separate faces instead of the whole object only. Selective face alpha-ing wooooo!